iOS has recently seen a surge of board game conversions. The iPad platform has lent itself nicely to tabletop gaming and while it’s not perfect it’s at least functional for a group of four or so people to crowd around it and play a game no longer relegated to cardboard. With Pathogen, Vermont-based studio, Birnam Wood Games, has thrown their hat into the iOS board game ring and they’ve made an awfully good showing.
Rather than porting over an existing board game Pathogen is an iOS original that feels inspired by games like Go and Othello. You and up to three more opponents will place pieces or “cells” on a board to try and claim as much territory as possible. As you play you’ll see cells propagate and even take over other cells in the process. The winner is whoever controls the most space on the board once it’s filled up.
The game provides you with several different types of pieces to work with. A Cells, B Cells, C Cells, and a Virus which serves as a sort of nuke to drop on enemies in an attempt to impede their progress. If you put an A cell on the board it just makes a single dot. If you put an A cell on top of another A cell it will expand and upgrade the middle piece to a B. If you expand your cells while you’re directly next to another player’s pieces you’ll hijack their pieces as well. If you upgrade your pieces all the way up to C and then place another C cell on top of them you will wall them off, preventing anybody else from messing with your cells.
It sounds simple, but there’s a steeper learning curve here than you might expect. I found Pathogen’s mechanics not only difficult to write about but also difficult to explain to new players. Luckily the game’s campaign takes things pretty slow and keeps all the tutorials intact when you go back to play the original levels so I was able to get people up to speed pretty easily by just having them play the first few levels of the campaign before our multiplayer onslaught. The game is pretty hard to describe to somebody but pretty easy to understand when you see it in action.
Somewhat easy to pick up but difficult to master describes the situation here perfectly. I played a few hours worth of multiplayer games with fellow Enemy Slime members and found that almost every few turns someone would say something to the effect of “Well that wasn’t what I thought would happen.” after placing a piece on the board.
Pathogen’s gameplay does keep you pretty well invested. Things can turn on a dime and there were several games I played where I thought I had everything on lockdown just to watch someone else make a smart move and completely overturn my board. It’s a nice contrast to some other board games where you watch someone take the lead early on and just follow them for the rest of the game. In Pathogen you may be down, but you’re rarely completely out.
Pathogen’s campaign doesn’t take long if your goal is just to see some end credits but if you play every available level there’s somewhere around 36 of them to keep you busy. The AI plays well and even on the lowest difficulty setting feels a lot like playing with another person.
As you progress in the game you’ll also find gameplay mutations. Infection maps play like normal except at the end of every turn all the cells on the board expand which means the map fills up much quicker than normal. On Control Zone maps you and your opponents can drop your cells into control points. If you fill up an entire section all for yourself the cells automatically wall off. On Erosion maps there will be barriers blocking your cells from spreading that dissolve randomly as the game progresses. These mutations are all a lot of fun and add a lot of replay value to what was already a pretty solid base concept. Some of them are also available for multiplayer games as well although I was disappointed to see that Infection maps were only available in the campaign.
I’d say the game’s biggest problem isn’t even really a problem so much as it is a missed opportunity. Pathogen pegs itself as inspired by the way disease’s replicate, and while the way pieces move and control reflects that, none of the design on top of it really feels related. The music and art all come together to make the game feel like it takes place in space, which isn’t usually where I think of diseases being. It’s more a design choice than anything else but everyone I played the game with asked the same question, “What does this have to do with diseases?”
The game provides interesting and very thorough post game statistics, so you can see just how badly you beat everybody and rub it in their face.
Although the game’s presentation feels off the mechanics behind it are solid and offer a lot of fun and strategy if you’re willing to take the time to master them. There’s definitely a little bit of a learning curve but I think you could plop this down on a table and get a four player game up and running with everyone comprehending the rules pretty well within a half hour or so.
With a solid single player campaign, a map editor, and both online and local multiplayer I’d definitely say Pathogen is an absolute steal at $2.99 in the app store. It may take a little while to learn the ropes but you’ll feel great once you’ve mastered it.
This game was reviewed using pre-release code provided to us by the publisher.
